This material on Direct Instruction teaching takes me back to some recent
work of mine on different modes of primary school classroom dialogue.
(Northern Ghana )
One recurrent classroom dialogue mode is highly formulaic. The teacher sets
this mode going - in the way accounts (e.g. of some factual topic) are in
fact 'assertions' that become formal texts to memorise and repeat on demand;
in the way s/he elicits and responds to questions - etc. etc.
What is striking in these formulaic classrooms is that both pupils
and teacher(s) become skilled in the routines. They seem to enjoy
participating. Those in each role act as though they were conducting a
valuable, joint, performance. The object of my research is to understand
elements/processes' of effective learning: but whatis being learned here is
dialogue routines.
One wonders what kind of dialogue built the discourse fragments Bill
refers to as 'giant words'. Each 'chunk' of formulaic dialogue often comes
to sound like a 'giant word'. - See classroom videos.
Am off to Ghana for a months. Would love to pick this up when I
return.
Esther
-----Original Message-----
From: xmca-bounces@weber.ucsd.edu [mailto:xmca-bounces@weber.ucsd.edu] On
Behalf Of mike cole
Sent: 26 January 2012 01:38
To: Bill Kerr
Cc: eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity
Subject: Re: [xmca] Bruner on Vygotsky
Bill-- Interesting that an indigenous teacher is using Direct Instruction.
In writing about the cultural deprivation controversies of the 1960's
Engelmann and Bereiter played a special role. Here is the context for my
query in the form of a long quotation with a little
of my own words in it. The rest is an article by Bereiter which seems
succinctly to capture the strategy and its rationale.
FYI
mike
------------------
"The speech of the severely deprived children seems to consist not of
distinct words, as does the speech of middle-class children of the same
age, but rather of whole phrases or sentences that function like giant
words. That is to say, these "giant word" units cannot be taken apart by
the child and re-combined; they cannot be transformed from statements to
questions, from imperatives to declaratives, and so on. Instead of saying
"He's a big dog," the deprived child says "He bih daw." Instead of say-ing
"I ain't got no juice," he says "Uai-ga-na-ju." Instead of saying "That is
a red truck," he says "Da-re-truh." Once the listener has become
ac-customed to this style of speech, he may begin to hear it as if all the
sounds were there, and may get the impression that he is hearing articles
when in fact there is only a pause where the article should be. He may
believe that the child is using words like *it, is, **if, *and *in, *when
in fact he is using the same sound for all of them-something on the order
of "ih." (This becomes apparent if the child is asked to repeat the
state-ment "It is in the box." After a few attempts in which he becomes
con-fused as to the number of "ih's" to insert, the child is likely to be
reduced to a stammer.)
If the problem were merely one of faulty pronunciation, it would not be so
serious. But it appears that the child's faulty pronunciation arises from
his inability to deal with sentences *as sequences of meaning-ful parts.
*Even
a sophisticated adult will have difficulty pronouncing a very long word if
he is unable to deal with it in parts (the reader might take a try at
EMPIANASROFLALILIMINLIAL, reading it aloud once and then trying to repeat
it from memory). In the Cognitive Maturity Test, children are called upon
to repeat sentences of varying degrees of complexity. The severely
disadvantaged child will tend to give merely an approximate rendition of
the over-all sound profile of the sentence, often leaving out the sounds in
the middle, as is common when people are trying to reproduce a meaningless
series-this in spite of the fact that the words themselves are often very
simple, like "A big truck is not a little truck." Bereiter and Engelmann
(1966, p. 34-35)
Bereiter characterized the underlying logic and practical
application of the approach in the following terms. (Again we quote at
length because the way issues were being discussed is so revealing of
underlying assumptions.)
The language program we have used was originated by my colleague, Siegfried
Engelmann. His outstanding achievement in this program, I believe, is a
bold simultaneous solution to the problem of time, and the problem of
priorities. As Engelmann saw it, the child's primary need was for a
language that would enable him to be taught. Once the child had that, you
could go on and teach him anything else you pleased. Such a language did
not have to be distilled from a recording of actual verbal behavior but
could be constructed, much as Basic English was constructed, by a
consideration of the needs it had to serve. Such a language could be
taught to children in a relatively short time (in practice, two to six
months), and it would then be possible to add the refinements of complete
English and also to teach other things in a more direct and normal manner.
Teaching disadvantaged children a miniature language that someone else has
made up for them may sound a bit 1984ish to the doubters among us; but
realize that it is regular English, just a stripped-down version of it, and
that the principle of starting with a miniature system which is part of,
but more easily grasped than, the entire system is
a respectable and widely used pedagogical device. Methods of reading
instruction that begin with a limited vocabulary t hat follows a few
consistent spelling rules are an example, as are physics lessons that begin
with consideration of a homogeneous frictionless environment.
To describe the basic language program briefly, it presumes nothing more of
the child at the outset than that he be capable of making some attempt at
imitating what is said to him. Only two basic-statement forms are taught,
the first being the identity statment, "This is a ___ ," and "This is not a
." Once this statement type is mastered (and mastery of the not-statement
is a major challenge to many seriously deprived children), the remainder of
the beginning
language program is devoted to work with the statement form, "This ___ is
," with its negative and plural variations, introducing several different
kinds of concepts that are used in the predicates of these statements:
polar sets (big-little, hot-cold, and so on); nonpolar sets, such as the
colors and prepositional phrases; and subclass nouns, as in "This animal is
a tiger."
What part of all of this has been imported into Australia? Does it come in
a red or a green bottle? :-)
mike
PS- sorry if this is a distraction from the topic of JSB and LSV.
On Wed, Jan 25, 2012 at 12:31 AM, Bill Kerr <billkerr@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Wed, Jan 25, 2012 at 2:24 PM, mike cole <lchcmike@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Bill-- A shocker the Englemann is peddling DE. Just been reviewing its
>> origins in Toronto, lo these 50 years. Chilling.
>>
>
> My impression of Engelmann, Mike, is that his practice is good or at least
> worth a close look but theoretically he shoots from the hip without much
> discernment. I know a few home schooling families who have used his
> materials to good effect in teaching their kids to read and write. Also
> have been on other lists and heard parents with disadvantaged kids say his
> was the only approach that worked.
>
> With disadvantaged students the teacher has to take much more control of
> the programme than is possible with middle class students, provide
> additional detailed scaffolding etc. (The reason I found the AL course
> great was that it outlined a pathway to do this for language
> teaching) Engelmann has worked with disadvantaged students his whole
career
> and developed an approach that seems to work but at the same
> time indiscriminately criticises good educators such as Dewey and
> educational approaches such as constructivism, which have both good and
bad
> implementations. I half read his bio, "Teaching Needy Kids in Our Backward
> System: 42 Years of Trying". He's a practitioner, not a theoretician. But
> possible a very good practitioner.
>
> At any rate I'm very interested in the fact that Noel Pearson, an
> indigenous leader in Australia, is using Engelmann's approach here.
>
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